Falkirk endured the pain of discovering that larceny can be as central to a cup final as the presentation of the trophy. They were also reminded that the perpetrators have no time for remorse.

This unconvincing victory, from the substitute Nacho Novo's only meaningful touch of the ball, brought Rangers the Scottish Cup to go with the Scottish Premier League Championship they had won at Tannadice six days earlier. Only their most fanatical followers would make any claim to merit on behalf of a winning team who were clearly second-best in everything except the matter of producing a legitimate goal.

Distinguished doubles are often difficult to achieve for no other reason than the celebration from securing the first leg can have a harmful effect on the chances of completing the second.

Rangers appeared for long periods of this seasonal climax to have extended the league championship-winning party of the previous week beyond what would have been considered by their management team to be healthy.

Especially through a first half in which the long odds-on favourites should have fallen at least one but probably two goals behind, the Ibrox players evinced the woolly headed and stiff-jointed movement of men whose nights have been spent concentrating on self-indulgence.

Even if allowances could have been made for a certain slowness in Rangers to warm up, few, if any, in the stadium could have anticipated the comprehensiveness of Falkirk's superiority during most of the 90 minutes.

John Hughes's team were emphatically the more threatening, even if the menace was accompanied by the uneasy recognition of their season-long ability to outplay opponents and leave defeated as a consequence of their inability to exploit their advantages.

What Falkirk enjoyed in that first half, with 60 per cent of the possession, was the establishment of a climate in which injustice would flourish. That they should miss two glorious opportunities to take a potentially decisive advantage seemed merely to underline the ­certainty of their looming ordeal.

Curiously, it was Neil McCann, one of the most experienced players on the field, who squandered both chances. The former Rangers midfielder first scraped the top of the bar with an 18-yard drive that was unhurried and unchallenged and should have been on target.

His second attempt was even more culpable, as Jackie McNamara's centre from the right found him isolated eight yards from his target. McCann swung wildly, screwing the ball right-footed wide of Neil Alexander's left post.

If Sod's law dictated that Rangers would inevitably take the lead, surely no one would have predicted that it would have occurred in the first minute of the second half and that it would be scored with the first touch of a substitute.

There had been, admittedly, a warning of sorts in the last minute of the first half when the Falkirk striker, Steve Lovell, stretched to deflect a header from David Weir – from a Sasa Papac corner on the left – over his own crossbar.

But Novo had just replaced the utterly ineffective Kris Boyd in attack when he moved forward to meet a throw-in from Papac out on the left. He took two strides forward and hit a 25-yard volley into Dani Mallo's left corner. The goalkeeper may have been unsighted as he made no attempt to make the save.

The most surprising element of Rangers' goal was that it did not have a noticeably dispiriting effect on its victims. Falkirk, if anything, were unrelenting in their claim to ownership of the game, maintaining their possession of the ball. Their manager's response to the challenge of producing at least the equaliser that would bring extra time was to throw three strikers – Michael Higdon, Carl Finnigan and Mark Stewart – at the problem, these three replacing the midfielders McCann, Kevin McBride and Patrick Cregg.

Those Falkirk supporters who have followed their team throughout the season would have concluded some time before the end that no manipulation of tactics or personnel would have made any difference to their prospects of ­ending the match goalless and potless.

In that second-half moment when they did put the ball in Rangers' net, a linesman had correctly signalled for offside long before. And, in the moment when a score would have been legitimate, Lovell's shot, slightly miscued and minimally deflected by Steve Davis, hit Alexander's right post.

It would be only one of a series of moments in which all those connected with Falkirk would experience the realisation that the biggest day of the season would belong to the other fellow.